Welcome to the Writing Center

The USML Writing Center serves students in all degree programs and all skill levels. Whether you are seeking help with researching a topic, with basic writing skills or with formatting your academic paper to the USML style, you have access to print and online resources and staff ready to help you.

Writing Center Resources
Check the Writing Center Course Reserves in the Library online catalog or stop by the Circulation Desk to see the print, audio, and online resources available. These resources are suitable for both ESL and native English speakers.

Center for Speech and Writing staff, including ESL specialists, are available to work with individuals and groups. The Writing Center offers drop-in help sessions in the Library McEssy Gallery on Wednesday evenings from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

Language Learning

The Mango Languages online learning system provides conversational and grammar instruction to 68 languages, including New Testament Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Religious and Scholarly Latin. Users are able to set up an account to track their progress through the course lessons. Mango also has free mobile apps available from Google Play or the Apple apps Store.

Organization and Citation Software Applications

and Evernote and OneNote are free productivity tools to help you organize class notes, clip notes from websites, or outline your research paper sources. Everything added to your notes are automatically synchronized across platforms and devices. The notes are searchable and allow for collaborative sharing. Both tools will recognize printed or handwritten text in photos and images.

Zotero is a free open source citation manager that will keep track of your sources and format your bibliographies. By enabling the retrieval of PDF metadata, citation records are created by dragging a PDF into Zotero. Available as a Firefox plug in, or a stand alone application to use with the browser of your choice. 300MB free online storage. Check out the Quick Start Guide

Mendeley offers a free version of the reference manager and a social collaboration tool. Mendeley has an integrated PDF viewer for annotation, highlighting and adding notes directly on your PDFs. Create citation records just from importing a PDF file. Both references and PDFs can be organized in folders. The free account includes 1GB of online storage. Check out the Mendeley overview

EndNote Basic is the online-only version of EndNote by Thomson Reuters. Get up to 2GB of Web storage for file attachments and increased storage for up to 50,000 references. EndNote offers sophisticated, flexible tools for organizing your citations. You can also create bibliographies using a combination of different fields to search.